Roger McNamee is a businessman, 🏷️#investor, 🏷️#venture-capitalist, and 🏷️#musician. He is the founding partner of the venture capital firm 📝Elevation Partners and brought on partners like Bono. Prior to co-founding the firm, McNamee co-founded private equity firm 📝Silver Lake Partners and headed the T. Rowe Price Science and Technology Fund.
McNamee started his career in 1982, as a twenty-six-year-old analyst at the investment firm T. Rowe Price when the personal-computer revolution was just beginning. He invested in Electronic Arts (now a leading video-game maker) and Sybase (a pioneering database firm), among others, eventually running one of the most successful funds in the industry.
In 1991, he partnered with the venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins, where he listened to pitches for Netscape and Amazon. He invested in those companies, too, and a few years later he co-founded Silver Lake Partners. The businesses in Silver Lake’s portfolio now produce two hundred and thirty billion dollars in annual revenue and employ three hundred and seventy thousand people. In the early two-thousands, McNamee helped create a private-equity firm, Elevation Partners, which invested two hundred and ten million dollars in Facebook in 2009 and 2010, two years before it went public.
If the founders of Big Tech were a family, McNamee might be its eccentric uncle. A longtime guitarist who still plays some fifty shows a year, he has toured for more than two decades with an evolving cast of venture capitalists, technologists, and career musicians such as Pete Sears, of Jefferson Starship. On tracks like the stoner anthem “It’s 4:20 Somewhere,” by his band Moonalice, McNamee performed under the stage name Chubby Wombat.
McNamee saw the tech industry as an experiment in creative and profitable problem-solving. He grew unnerved by its ethical failures only in 2012 when Uber came to him for investment capital. He decided that Silicon Valley had changed. “These guys all wanted to be monopolists,” he said recently. “They all want to be billionaires.”
👆 the opening of 'Big Tech's Big Defector' published in The New Yorker and a highly, highly recommended read (or listen). McNamee speaks about the dangers of 📝Surveillance Capitalism.